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Topic: STYLE MANAGER only partly working? (Read 3816 times)

Having laid out my book, using Scibus1.4.2, I decided to reduce the typeface for the Body Text and Chapter Titles. I changed the pt. size for the chapter title using Style Manager, but subsequently found that only part of the Chapter Title had been changed. I switched to Story Editor, deleted the Title and retyped it - it worked.

Having made similar changes (using Style Manager) I now find that in some of my chapters only part of the body text has been changed - I do not want to have to retype all of that!!!.

Am I doing something wrong, or is there a fault somewhere?

The last frustration - my book is finished and I want to get it printed!

What you are attempting to do does work. However, if you override a style by manually changing parameters, those changes will stick and not be changed by a subsequent change to the style menu. Alternatively you might have inadvertently not applied the same style to all the paragraphs you are attempting to change.

Tony, I know you're almost at the end of your production process so this might not be relevant at the moment but it might be something to think about for the future.

You might find it easier to put your chapter titles in separate text frames. That way you can apply a "chapter" paragraph style to just the chapter frames (using the Properties palette) and a "body" paragraph style to the other text frames.

If all of your body text is in a set of linked frames you only need to apply the style - or change of style - to the first frame. The rest will fall into line automatically.

You can then use the text flow functionality to make space around the chapter frames as you need it.

Then, if any weird stuff happens with style changes not being applied properly you can just re-apply the style to the whole frame (or set of linked frames) and put everything right very quickly.

Personally I find it much easier to keep frames to a single paragraph style - applied "en masse" via Properties - as Scribus sometimes does some unexpected things with styles, as you've unfortunately found out.

Of course, if you also apply character styles then what I've said above is pretty irrelevant as you'd have to go back and re-apply all of the necessary changes everywhere. But it's worth keeping in mind for simple stuff.

What I meant by manually override is you make your publication using a given style or styles. Now you decide you would like to change certain sections, maybe a sentence or paragraph, so you highlight that and use text properties to change the font and size.Now if you go into the paagraph style editor and make some changes like font size and click apply, all the text governed by that style should respond, but not that portion you changed previously.I'm not sure about character styles, I imagine the correct usage is to do everything using paragraph styles, but you might occasionally want to make a change as in my first paragraph above. If you consistently wanted to make the same change in different parts of the document, you might want to capture the parameters in a character style. You could confine yourself to just using character styles, but that is limiting since paragraph styles permits more settings like spacing etc. Personally, I haven't had occasion to use character styles and maybe others have a better explanation for it's existence.

For example, they're great for highlighting weblinks in a document - e.g. in blue and underlined - or for applying emphasis like italics/bold etc.

The best way I've found to use character styles is to:1. First create a character style, for this example let's call it "Script" for some script/code text - this is the "base" style of your text.2. Then create a paragraph style (e.g. "Script Paragraph") with its "character style" based on your new character style ("Script").3. Then create another new character style (e.g. "Script Underlined") based on the original ("Script") but with only the necessary changes, in this case add an underline.

You can then apply the paragraph style to whatever text you want, then also apply the character style as necessary to parts of the text.

If you then want to change the font - or whatever - you just change the original character style ("Script") and the other styles that are based on it will automatically be changed.

The images below shows what I mean. The first image shows an example where there are two character styles - a "base" one in "Source Code Pro" font and another one based on the first but with underlining switched on - and one paragraph style based on the character style. Then, for the second image I simply changed the font in the "base" character style to "Travelling Typewriter" and clicked Apply. Hey Presto, the font was changed and the underlining was preserved. No messing about.

I realise it might look like a lot of work for something that looks so simple but if you get into the habit of doing this then one day you'll be so glad you did when you have to make a big change.

I freely admit to not doing this myself from time to time and almost always end up kicking myself when I realise I've got to do lots of changes instead of one simple one.